Ballarat, Sale and Hamilton Shell Servos Lift Unleaded 21 Cents in Perfect Lockstep

Pull into the Shell in Hamilton this morning and unleaded is 244.6 cents a litre. Drive more than 500 kilometres east to the Shell in Bairnsdale and it's 238.6. The two towns have different customers and different local competition. Yet over their last eight price changes, those two servos and four other regional Shell stations across Victoria have moved by exactly the same amount on exactly the same days.

Up 4 cents, up 6, up 4, up 2. Then a cent a day for three days, and another 2 cents this morning. That's 21 cents apiece, in lockstep.

Six towns, one set of moves

Here's where the six Shell Reddy Express sites sat at 8:00am AEST on Tuesday 22nd Sep 2026, according to Petrolmate data:

Every board has made the same moves from a different starting point, so the 16 cent gap between Ballarat and Sale hasn't budged. Go back to 1 September and four of the six are up exactly 33.1 cents.

Who sets the price

What most people don't realise is that nobody in Hamilton sets that price. Under a 2019 alliance deal, Viva Energy took over fuel pricing at what were then Coles Express sites. In May 2023 it bought the business outright for about $300 million and began rebranding it Reddy Express. Viva also runs the refinery at Geelong, so the company making the petrol is the same one writing the number on the board.

That number follows the wholesale market almost to the cent. The Australian Institute of Petroleum's average terminal gate price for unleaded in Melbourne, which is essentially the wholesale price at the fuel terminal, went from 195.2 cents on 1 September to 227.7 on Monday, a rise of 32.5 cents. Over roughly the same stretch, the regional Shell boards added 33.1.

Why neat daily steps rather than one big jump? Blame, or credit, Victoria's daily price cap, which I wrote about when it started on 10 March. Every servo lodges a maximum price for the next day between 8:30am and 2pm. That cap applies from 6am for 24 hours, and a servo can't charge more than any price it has already offered that day. In practice, 6am is the only time a Victorian price can go up, so a wholesale surge gets climbed one step a day.

Victoria isn't the first to try this. Austria has run a similar rule since 2011, letting stations raise prices only once a day, at noon. Western Australia went further in 2001, fixing prices for a full 24 hours.

The independents stopped climbing

The rival servos in these towns rose in bigger, lumpier steps, and most of them stopped around the weekend. The Shell boards kept going.

Matthews Hamilton has held at 229.9 since the weekend, 14.7 cents under the Shell across town. On a 60 litre tank that's $8.82. In Moe, four servos sit on an identical 229.5. Mobil in Traralgon has been on 229.2 since late last week, and APCO in Bairnsdale is under 230.

The standout is in Ballarat North, where Burk Ballarat North is at 223.3. That's below Monday's Melbourne wholesale benchmark, and prices under the terminal gate rarely stay there long.

Sale is the dearest town of the six. Its cheapest unleaded this morning was around 240, while Traralgon, about 50 kilometres west along the Princes Highway, has four servos under 230.

When wholesale turns

Wholesale is still rising (it added 2.8 cents between Friday and Monday), which is why the Shell staircase keeps going. For now the independents are wearing that on thin margins.

The ACCC has observed for years that regional prices tend to be slower coming down than going up. Victoria's rules don't limit price cuts at all. They can happen at any hour, so there's nothing stopping a staircase down that's just as tidy as the one going up.

The practical upshot for your wallet

Six country towns priced in perfect step by one national network is about as clear a look behind the scenes as motorists ever get. Keep an eye on whether the price comes down as neatly as it went up.